Best of Interop 2014 Product Award Winners

The Best of Interop Awards recognize innovative hardware and software that represent technological advancement in a specific category. The Interop judging team poured through 129 submissions in nine categories, including networking, mobility, and security. This year we chose to mix this up a little by creating a separate storage category and adding a whole new SDN category. Awards were also presented for Grand Award winner, Best Startup, and Audience Choice. See who took home the prize this year

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Storage and Audience Choice

Product:VMware VSAN

For our judges, VMware's VSAN is the standard bearer for a new class of storage solutions that promise to revolutionize how the world buys storage. VSAN, which runs directly in the VMware ESXi hypervisor, takes the flash SSD and spinning disk installed in a cluster of ESXi servers into a single shared pool of hybrid storage. This eliminates not only the storage array itself, but also the complexity of connecting the ESXi hosts to a dedicated SAN. As in hyperscale storage systems like Hadoop and Google's GFS, VSAN provides data protection by replicating virtual disk files across multiple hosts in the cluster rather than relying on RAID.

Respondents are on a roll: 53% brought their private clouds from concept to production in less than one year, and 60% ­extend their clouds across multiple datacenters. But expertise is scarce, with 51% saying acquiring skilled employees is a roadblock.